I Heart the Daily News
Mar 15th, 2006 at 10:09 am by Susie
And damn it, they’d better beat the odds again. Because I love the Daily News with a passion most Philadelphians reserve for the Eagles - and I get a lot more back on my emotional investment.
True, there were times they broke my heart (like when they hired Jimmy French, a goddamned 12-year-old, to write a column instead of me), but we worked through it. And from the time I moved out of my parents’ house (Bulletin people), the Daily News has been the thread that runs through my life.
I remember sitting outside on the steps of my University City apartment building in the 70s, reading the Daily News, when one of my high-falutin’ Penn faculty neighbors stopped to say hello. “You read that paper?” he said, pointedly.
I smiled. (I’m dangerous when I smile.) “You’ve never read the Daily News, have you?” I said sweetly.
He allowed as how he hadn’t.
“Well, you see, the Daily News is the writer’s paper,” I said. “If you read it, you’d know that and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
It was a glorious time. Rolfe Neill, the then-editor, and successor Gil Spencer wrangled a herd of some of the best writers around. People like the militantly self-destructive but funny as shit Pete Dexter (who won a National Book Award a few years later for “Paris Trout”), Larry McMullen, Philadelphia’s schmaltzier answer to Jimmy Breslin, who would occasionally write something so breathtaking, you’d forgive the rest, and the insane gossip columnist Larry Fields - well, you just never knew what they’d do next. That sold papers.
“Pete Dexter, for my money, is in a small group of all-time greatest columnists,†Steve Lopez says. “He wrote with such swagger, with such weight and power. His words would sit on the page like a fist.â€
The columnists aren’t so hot anymore (HIRE ME HIRE ME HIRE ME), but we do like their blogger. And the beat writers’ beatific, twisted humor still runs deep, like an undertow:
“Margie is good people,†said the groom, “but Thinker, he shakes my hand and gives me a kiss and is plotting to turn the Philly Pagans into the Angels.â€
“I sponsored Thinker when he came into the Pagans and then he betrayed me,†said DiPietro, who wore a ponytail with a Pagan vest over his black tuxedo at the reception.
“He went to the Hells Angels, and I went to jail.â€
Philadelphia without the Daily News is simply unthinkable. I’d have to move - again. And you know how I hate moving.
Damn. That first link (naturally the last one I clicked, searching for the source of your excerpt in reverse order, why am I so good at doing that kind of thing?) is fine writing. Just letting people speak, but fine, fine writing.
“He went to the Hells Angels, and I went to jail.”
Don’t know why that gets to me, but it sure does.
Kind regards,
Dog, etc.
searching for home
I vaguely remember Pete Dexter’s column running in one of my Left Coast hometown papers — LA Herald=Examiner or Seattle Post-Intelligencer (a paper unfortunately on it’s last legs right now).
When was he writing, or is he still active? Did he go national at some point?
Jimmy French was briefly my classmate at Rhawnhurst Elementary. I remember him as a throwback to the 1940s, right down to the fedora. I have vague memories that he came to some sort of untimely end, being involved in a crime maybe? But I can’t remember whether he was the victim or the perpetrator. If you have any information about him, please send it to me. Thanks.